Tech nostalgia: What the web used to look like

Given that technology has been built to push the boundaries of future innovation, its rapid pace rarely affords us the time to look back and marvel at just how far we’ve come.

64 Bits, a new free exhibition at Here East, situated within London’s Olympic Park, casts a nostalgic eye over the web of the past, and is open until 21 April. Here are just some of the highlights:

A new way of looking at art

Susan Kare joined Apple in 1982, and designed many of the fonts and icons still in use in Macs and other Apple products to this day, including Apple’s Chicago font, the happy and sad Mac icons and the trash can.

As part of the marketing drive for the first Macintosh computer in 1984, Kare recreated the famous Japanese woodprint Kamisuki 髪隙 (Combing the Hair) using Macpaint, the company’s graphics editing software. She drew it from a woodcut owned by Steve Jobs as an example of the kind of precise detail it was capable of capturing, and it has become the most famous example of artwork recreated on Macpaint.

Kare followed Jobs to NeXT in 1985, and went on to create graphics for Microsoft, IBM and Facebook. She now works at Pinterest.

The first ever website

The UK’s own Sir Tim Berners Lee developed the world’s first publicly available website back in 1991 while working at CERN in Switzerland. It began as a project back in 1989, and went through several prototypes before launching fully two years later.

Though offline for many years, the site was reinstated and is available to view here, looking largely as it did over 20 years ago, explaining the principles of the world wide web and how it should be used.

The first webcam

The world’s first webcam was set up by researchers at Cambridge University in 1991, pointed at the shared coffee perxolator to avert the crushing disappointment of arriving and finding the pot empty.

The little Philips camera was only capable of capturing three images a minute, but it was enough to allow the computer scientists to regularly check in on it using the University’s internal network.

Scientists Martyn Johnson and Daniel Gordon started broadcasting the coffee pot to the world in 1993 after web browers began to support images, before it was finally switched off in August 2001.

First e-commerce purchase? Pizza

Though debate has raged over what the first ever item sold online was for years, Pizza Hut claim it holds that particular honour. The fast food restuarant set up its PizzaNet service back in 1994, allowing customers to order food online in a manner the LA Times claimed was “not as simple as picking up the phone”.

Still, as computationally clever as on-line ordering may be, it misses the point of what this medium can do. Fundamentally, there’s not much difference between ordering a pizza over the phone and ordering one on-line. The transaction is basically a commodity. The trick is to figure out new ways to create value for the customer,” writer Michael Schrage wrote at the time.

Digital landscapes

Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital make up the art collective eBoy, creating a colourful, graphic form of art which has inspired everything from Habbo Hotel to the opening sequence of satirical comedy Silicon Valley.

64 Bits is open from 30 March until 21 April 2017, Here East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, London

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